Frank Podmore

“ It will be noticed, indeed, by any one who carefully compares a large number of these narratives, that, in the more recent cases at any rate, the waking vision is not often represented as giving a message of particular import. The apparition seen with the eyes open may resemble the dead man, but the resemblance is to the figure familiar to the percipient in life. It is, in other words, open to us to suppose that the clothing and imagery are supplied by the percipient's own imagination. There is rarely any novel feature of costume; rarely any communication to other senses than that of sight. ”

“ But as a matter of fact the experience of mankind is not uniform in this matter; and when we are forced by the mere accumulation of testimony to go on adding one strained and improbable explanation to another, and to assume at last an epidemic of misrepresentation, perhaps even an organised conspiracy of falsehood, a point is at length reached in which the sum of improbabilities involved in the negation of thought-transference must outweigh the single improbability of a new mode of mental affection. ”

“ Is there not, therefore, more than a touch of human conceit in the imagination which depicts the spirits of the dead as having no other function than to hover invisibly around the living as futile spectators of the follies and the crimes of earth? ”

“ Automatic writing for the most part, no doubt, brings to the surface only the débris of lapsed memories and half-formed impressions which have never reached the focus of consciousness—the stuff that dreams are made of. ”

“ I stood at the top of the kitchen stairs, where there is a door into the garden behind the house. I saw a lady pass by, rather tall, in black silk, with white collar and cuffs, a handkerchief in her hand, and a widow's fall. I had heard about the ghost, but it never struck me that this figure could be a ghost—it looked so like an ordinary person. I thought that some one had come to call and missed her way to the door. The family were at tea and I was merely waiting, so out of curiosity I followed the lady round the house. ”

“ Briefly then, to the older philosophy the mind of man seemed a thing apart, a clear-cut indissoluble unity, whose permanence and identity admitted neither doubt or degree. To the new experimental psychology, the unity of consciousness is a mere illusion; it is even as the "elementary" nature of earth, air, and water, the unreasoned judgment of ignorance. The composite and unstable nature of our consciousness can be inferred even from the manifestations of normal waking and sleep. ”

“ When no note is made, and we have to depend entirely on the memory of the narrator writing after the fact of the coincidence is known, there are many errors from which the most scrupulous of witnesses can scarcely hope to hold himself altogether free. Often the percipient's experience may be coloured in retrospection by the emotion roused by the news subsequently received. In any case with the lapse of time the picture preserved in the memory is liable to be unconsciously brought more and more into conformity with the narrator's conception of what ought to have happened. ”

“ One obvious defect in the symbolic dream or omen is that there is no intrinsic relation between the event and its symbol. Our own ancestors saw a connection between comets and disasters; and the modern Celt believes will-o'-the-wisp lights to betoken death. Prima facie, the one belief has as much to say for itself as the other. There is a natural tendency to believe that an unusual occurrence, anything out of the ordinary routine of life, is to be construed as a portent. ”

“ No single narrative can afford to stand alone. Each contains one or more elements of weakness; and in the last resort chance coincidence, memory-hallucination, or even deliberate deception would be in any single case a more probable explanation than a new mode of mental affection. It is only, to borrow Mr. Gurney's metaphor, as a faggot, and not as a bundle of separate sticks, that the evidence can finally be judged. ”

“ But in dealing with the phenomena presented by Spiritualist mediums, even errors of perception are often of less importance than errors of memory. The record of any event, or series of events, preserved in our memory is in no case comparable to a photograph. It is more like a picture or even a map. It is a selection, a work of art; and unfortunately in the present case the principle of selection, the aesthetic guidance, are supplied by the medium. ”

“ While Moir was on the way from the house, the idea of his dream occurred to him with such intense vividness that he turned and went back to the house. Saying nothing to any one in the house, he took a spade, and walked direct to the spot of which he had so distinct a recollection in connection with his dream, and removed a little of the turf from the surface. After he had done so, he put the spade down its full length into the ground and lifted up the earth. In the spadeful of earth, however, there was an entire human skull. ”

“ The simplest case of all is that in which the fact of the death is announced by dream, vision, or inner voice before the news could have reached the percipient by normal means, but at such an interval after the death as to make the supposition of latency no longer tenable. We could not of course expect that such cases would be as numerous as those in which the dream or vision approximately coincides with the death, if for no other reason than that generally the news would be conveyed, by letter or telegram, to those most nearly concerned within a day or two at most. ”

“ The wonder is rather that the deceased should trouble themselves at all about us and have leisure to devise means of communication with the world they have left. For if we are to conceive them as surviving death at all, it must be as ipso facto entering into a new and engrossing phase of existence (all the more engrossing because of its novelty) and as needing to adapt themselves to new conditions of existence. ”

“ Yet, while fully recognising these repelling features of the manifestations, I am yet convinced that there is enough that is genuine remaining to prove the existence of a direct communication between mind and mind during the trance state. A single success exceeding the limits of coincidence (and it is undeniable that there are many such) proves the possibility; the multitude of failures merely indicates the difficulty and uncertainty. ”

“ Myers accepted to the full the results of recent research. He recognised that the human consciousness, as we know it, is a highly composite and unstable thing, having neither completeness nor essential unity. It is in short, to employ his favourite simile, like the visible spectrum, a selection —accidental, interrupted, and variable—from a larger whole. But at this point Myers's view diverges from those of the recognised schools. To him the surface consciousness, the only thing which we know as consciousness in ordinary life, is comparatively unimportant. ”

“ But when, to take the strongest case, a man sees the vision of a friend at the time of his death, we have no such safeguards to ensure the accuracy of the record. The vision finds him unprepared and often unable to appreciate its significance. Even when the impression produced is such as to induce the percipient to make a note of the circumstance or to write a letter about it before the correspondence with the death is known, it is but rarely, as the following narratives will show, that the contemporary record is preserved. ”

“ The evening of Easter Sunday was so fine that when Miss Jowett (the landlady's daughter) brought in the lamp, I begged her not to pull down the blinds, and lay on the sofa looking out at the sea, while my son was reading at the table. Owing to a letter I had just received from my sister at home, stating that one of the servants had again seen 'the old lady,' my thoughts had been directed towards ghosts and such things. But I was not a little astonished when, on presently looking out of the window, I saw the figure of a woman standing at the edge of the verandah. ”

“ The old notion that a ghost was actually the spirit of the deceased person himself was inextricably bound up with the assumption that the figure seen had a material or objective reality. If we admit that the thing seen is but a dream figure, it becomes natural to endeavour to trace its source to an agency of whose operation we have independent proof—that is, thought transference from the living. ”

“ But, on the other hand, we have good reason to believe that telepathic communication of all kinds is most readily established when, as in sleep or trance, the faculties which deal with the life of relation are in abeyance. We have no reason therefore for distrusting the accuracy of a dream story, on the sole ground that it imports sensational features of the kind referred to.
I propose to cite a few narratives in which information purporting to proceed from a deceased person, and beyond the conscious knowledge of the recipient, was communicated in dream or some allied state. ”

“ Again, one of the most marked characteristics of the subliminal consciousness, whether in dream, hypnosis, spontaneous trance, or in crystal vision and other automatism, is its power of visualisation—a power which, as Mr. Galton has shown, and our daily experience proves, tends to become aborted in later life. And beyond these indications of memories lost and imagery crowded out in the lifetime of the individual, we come across traces of faculties which have long ceased to obey the guidance or minister to the needs of civilised man—the psychological lumber of many generations ago. ”

“ Yet dreams belong to the same order of mental phenomena as hallucinations, and are commonly so classed—such differences as exist being mainly due to the conditions under which the two sets of phenomena respectively occur. In fact, a hallucination is simply a hypertrophied thought—the last member of a series, whose intermediate terms are to be found in the mind's-eye pictures of ordinary life, in the vivid images which some artists can summon at will, and in the Faces in the Dark which many persons see before passing into sleep, with its more familiar and abundant imagery. ”

“ That a dying man, whilst failing to impress the idea of his own personality upon the mind of a distant acquaintance, should succeed in calling up the image—to himself of quite secondary importance—of the clothes which he habitually wore, would seem at first sight a paradox. But the difficulty disappears if we recognise that the telepathic impression in such cases is probably received and the hallucination elaborated by a subconscious stratum of the intelligence, and that the picture is in due time flashed up thence fully formed to the ordinary consciousness. ”